Your Least Favorite Topic: Backups

Our new backup tools are here and make backup and recovery easy and worry-free!

Divio uses Git-based version management to handle all configuration and code and so, by default, all code is securely backed up and rolling back changes is as straight-forward as selecting a version and deploying with the Divio Desktop tools.

Also, since containers are built from repositories, there are no messy or long-forgotten configuration tweaks across multiple servers to remember and backup. This ensures a good general code of practice - all changes are centralised, logged and can be easily traced to commits and versions.

Backups Designed to Handle Databases and Media Files

The more complex and often nerve-racking part of backups is handling databases - how to rewind and restore data integrity in the event of a bug or code that leads to unexpected data changes? When was the last snapshot made and how long is the database down for during recovery and verification?

Media files can also be a challenge - especially if users are uploading material by themselves. Typically media files won't be stored in Git and so require a separate backup process. To compound things, media files referenced in a database could lose their reference index and leave a vast collection of orphaned files.

We wanted to simplify and streamline backups and make the process of backing up and recovery faster and easier. After extensive testing, we have just released our refreshed backups tools which we hope make backups even easier to manage!

New backup tools now available!

How Our Updated Backup Tools Work

The new backup tools provide more visual cues and insight on the type of backup - media, database or both and also extended details that make it easier to understand the relevance of backup. The inclusion of the last commit hash helps to associate a backup with a specific code deployment. You can also see when the next backup is scheduled to take place.

The same familiar backup strategies are available - scheduled (automated) and on-demand (manual) backups with the same retention policies as your existing project settings.

If you create an on-demand backup, the first thing you might notice is speed. On average, in our testing, the new backup tools are around 44% faster!

The dramatically faster on-demand backups help minimise wait-time for pushing new changes - you can quickly create a backup, deploy code changes, test and restore if necessary.

How To Restore a Backup With Divio

Restoring from a backup is easy - simply choose your preferred backup and target environment, and your environment will be restored momentarily. As with backups themselves, the restore process is fast and reverts your chosen environment while minimising the time your site is inaccessible. Once you have restored an environment, you can deploy update code through the Divio Desktop tools.

Downloading your backups gives you the ability to restore your local environment and store your backups in your preferred secure location. In order to minimise wait-time, you can prepare and schedule a download and choose your backup contents. Your download notification is mailed to your registered email with links to the requested backups.

You can try the new backup tools immediately including on-demand backups for free subscriptions and both scheduled and on-demand backups for economy plans and upwards!

Further Support

Need some guidance? We have updated our how-to guides to cover the new backup tools.

You can also find more detailed information on how our backups tools work in our essential knowledge series.